Coincidentally well timed - the new PEP on pattern matching would be great to include in the limited subset for teaching: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0

Coincidentally well timed - the new PEP on pattern matching would be great to include in the limited subset for teaching: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0636/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0636/ The above tutorial is based on user input but to my mind this mechanism seems equally good for teaching recursion on data structures as you would in say, ML.